What’s Your Longest Running Cisco Device?

I spent 3 years working at a NOC supporting very large enterprise networks. We would always get a kick out of seeing a Cisco device (router or switch) that had an uptime in the years. Every now and then we’d come across a device that just hummed along and never crashed, experienced a power outage, or was IOS upgraded. One of the customer networks I worked on had four routers that terminated all the DLSW in their network. Those four routers kept their manufacturing floors operating. Those routers were not allowed to crash or get upgraded. When I left they were running an 11.2 IOS code. Fortunately, they were also in the DC so power was not an issue. Those devices had uptime close to 4 years. They may still be running today which would put them near 7 years. I have to give Cisco credit. A mainline-IOS, particularly GD-code, can run for years. That’s a testament to its robustness. You would expect a memory leak or software bug triggered by network traffic to crash a router (which is just a computer) sometime inside of a year…or two…or three. A couple weeks ago a co-worker of mine came across our longest running Cisco device: WS-C6509 Software, Version NmpSW: 7.6(1) Copyright (c) 1995-2003 by Cisco Systems NMP S/W compiled on Apr 16 2003, 18:15:28 Uptime is 1166 days, 10 hours, 9 min It hurt him to do it, but he power-cycled it as part of a change control. 🙁 How about a simple contest? What’s your longest running Cisco device? Just reply to this blog with your entry. Sorry, no prizes other than your name in print. And no cheating…. 🙂